Wet Paint: Top Dealer Says Art Basel Must Be Cancelled This Fall, Kenny Schachter on a $16 Million Basquiat Sale, & More Juicy Art-World Gossip

Every week, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip
column of original scoops reported and written by Nate Freeman. If
you have a tip, email Nate at nfreeman@artnet.com.

BEGGING PLEADS FOR CANCELLED BASEL

Art Basel in
Basel, Switzerland—the word’s grandest
contemporary art expo—is, as of this writing, still set to open on
the Messeplatz in September, having been pushed
back from its normal June slot due to, well, you know. And while
many don’t expect to be resuming the jet-set lifestyle by early
fall, there’s a good chance that Art Basel will at least be
allowed to happen. On Wednesday, the Swiss Federal
Council announced that, starting June 6, public hangs of
up to 300 people can go on without fear of shaming, and cinemas,
theaters, and summer camps will all open, too. Barring a gnarly
second wave of infections in the landlocked state—still
possible!—there’s a whole three months of further reopening stages
Switzerland can move through before collectors are set to check in
to their rooms at the Three Kings. And sources say
that galleries in neighboring countries are praying to the
coronavirus gods the fair organizers will hold the expo in some
localized capacity, hoping that it’ll reignite the Schengen
Area art market that’s flatlined these last few
months. 

But other galleries are veering
strongly in the other direction. Sources directed my attention to a
scathing letter addressed to Marc Spiegler
penned by a certain prominent European dealer with spaces in three
cities, urging him to cancel the fair rather than put up booths
full of paintings in—and this is the tone maintained through the
letter—“this apocalyptic context.” And while the dealer hasn’t sent the
letter to the Basel brass yet, this week it was shared with dozens
of colleagues, and many are planning to co-sign it and insist that
Basel not happen in 2020. 

“The risks are simply too high:
it would be irresponsible to visitors, collectors, and not least to
our fellow gallerists,” reads the letter, which was shared with Wet
Paint by a dealer who got it from its author. “Two hundred people
were infected by the Covid-19 virus at
TEFAF in Maastricht, 80 were our
colleagues. Contrary to what certain groups of politicians claim,
many health experts cite evidence indicating the pandemic will
continue to pose a threat to gatherings of people.”

As of press time, the letter had
not yet been sent to Spiegler, and Basel reps didn’t comment when
we reached out.

Separately, Art Basel sent all
its exhibitors a note—shared with us first by a source, then
helpfully offered by the fair’s reps—clarifying some points in
light of the government’s new rolling back of restrictions. The
email went on about how some galleries would love to participate in
the fair, while others are, um, skeptical.

“In our recent conversations
with gallerists worldwide, many expressed their desire for the fair
to go forward—particularly those living in countries whose
societies have successfully begun reopening after long lockdowns,”
the Basel letter read. “That said, many gallerists have also shared
their concerns, reluctance, or unwillingness about doing the Basel
show.”

The letter also announced that,
though the Swiss government won’t talk about the status of
1000-person gatherings until June 24, Art Basel will get out ahead
and give exhibitors another update on the status of the September
fair by “the end of next week at the latest.”

KENNY’S CUTTING IN

Below is a special guest
item from the brilliant Wet Paint comrade Kenny
Schachter, who is a dealer, artist, and Artnet News
columnist. It’s chock full of his own juicy scoops that he has
gleaned during quarantine. Take it away, Kenny!

What do you get if you mix a
ghost writer with a guest host? Me! I am not one to sit on
information for too long, god knows I’ve been sitting on my ass
long enough during quarantine, so here I am dropping into
Nate Freeman’s inimitable column that I am such a
fan of. So impatient, in fact, I got on a nearly empty
United Airlines flight to London last week and
bounded onboard like an excitable kid on his first flight—it’s been
three awfully long months since I last visited an airport. When I
asked the steward to move me to a window seat, he refused due to
“weight and balance issues”—reassuring on a 747 with less than two
dozen passengers.

Now to some
juice. A valued source told me, subsequently confirmed by
both parties, that Eddie Martinez left
Timothy Taylor Gallery (for reasons of “personal
growth,” Eddie assured me when I called to
confirm). Unrelatedly, private equity suit Jason Levine ran off from his
beautiful (and now very available) fiancée, Sophia Cohen
(billionaire collector Steve Cohen‘s
daughter and a
Gagosian sales associate), not only grabbing
the engagement ring on his dash out the door, but also a case of
valuable red wine. 

On the subject of Larry
G, interviewed by
Bloomberg last week from his sumptuous
Hamptons digs, the mega gallerist, speaking of
himself in the third person, as one so mega is wont to do, said:
“When things go down like this you say, ‘Jesus, Larry, do you
really need all these galleries?’” Apparently he does, as to date, not a
single of his 300+ employees have been furloughed nor fired.
Selling take-away bento boxes from Kappo Masa,
Gagosian’s sushi restaurant, for $800 a pop goes a long way to hold
the 18-gallery-strong fort together. 

On the sales front, I have heard
of a Basquiat co-owned by the
Nahmad and Mugrabi clans
offloaded at $16.5 million,
and a $9 million Christopher Wool text work
flogged to a Swiss financier. Also, the Mugrabis bought a bushel of
Joel Mesler works ahead of his upcoming show with
Los Angeles gallery David Kordansky in November.
Sotheby’s also sold a meaty
Picasso private treaty. The market is showing
signs of life. Let’s hope the trend continues. Not to mention, when
I queried another Swiss friend whether he would
part with his blue-period Picasso for $150
million, based on
an offer from another pal, he
didn’t flinch while shooting down the prospect, saying maybe at
$500 million, he’d take it under more serious
consideration.

At least I was able to pick up a
free copy of Richard Prince’s publication
of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, “Truth Versus Lies,” which Prince
was giving away from a park bench in Central Park
10 years after he did the same with his reprinted edition of
“The Catcher in the Rye,” listing himself as the
author. Now I have both. Lastly, a private-museum-owning
billionaire, received—via his housekeeper, of course—a
government-issued support check for $1,200 signed by none other
than Donald Trump. The rich get richer. If you
can’t warrant winning votes, why not buy them outright? Now I will
hand the mic back from sunny London, where the only masks they wear
are the one’s covering their emotions, rather than their faces.
Lord help them. 

L.A.’S LAST SOLD-OUT SHOW

There aren’t many gallery shows
to see in Los Angeles at the moment, that’s for
sure. One of the few places that had been welcoming mask-wearing
visitors through its doors over the last month was a pop-up space
in the garage of an artist named Austyn Weiner,
who hung her new lush abstract paintings all throughout the
car-less space. Who is Austyn Weiner, you ask? Well, she’s had
recent solo shows at Bill Brady and the
Journal Gallery, and sources say one person who’s
been buying the work in bulk as of late is Philip
Niarchos, the Greek shipping heir who has perhaps the most
fabulous contemporary art collections on earth. And it doesn’t hurt
that she’s got 60,000 Instagram followers—though
that figure pales in comparison to 50 million followers
claimed by her close friend, Gigi Hadid, the
supermodel and sister to fellow supermodel Bella
Hadid. (Gigi also has a slightly less accomplished
brother, Anwar Hadid, though Anwar does date
pop star Dua Lipa. In the Before Times, Wet
Paint sat next to Dua Lipa at a
Lower East Side bar owned by the actor Justin
Theroux. My, how the world has changed.) 

Anyway! Hadid family follower
counts aside, sources say that Weiner’s painting show is a
quarantine hit over in La La Land. Making a pilgrimage to the
garage to see the works became, as one Hollywood
art-word figure put it, “a thing.” What’s more, the show was
completely sold out by the end of the run, with Weiner acting as
her own dealer and gallerist. Each work was $16,000, and buyers
include Matthew Perniciaro, who produced the
wonderful, must-see Rashid Johnson-directed
adaptation of “Native Son,” which you can watch
using the very device that you’re using to read this gossip column.
Head to HBO GO. Or is it HBO
Max? Who knows. Hard to keep track these
days. 

POP QUIZ

We’ll cut to the chase: the
answer to last week’s quiz was Tamara de Lempicka’s
Nue á la Colombe
(Nude with
Dove) (1928). And it is in the collection of the material girl
herself, Madonna. And it’s not her only
one. “I have a ton of her
paintings in New York,” she told Vanity
Fair in 1990. “I have a Lempicka museum.”

We have three responders who
came in first, all at right about the same time. They are the
South Carolina-based artist Jeni
Kim; Jeffrey Grove, who is a curator, the
founder of The Art Advisory, and the director of
museums and publications at Sean Kelly Gallery;
and Lock Kresler, senior director at Levy
Gorvy, running the London gallery. Congrats, all! You
did it! You have summited the snowy apex of art-world insider
bragging rights! 

On to this week’s clue. Who is
this actor, what is the work on the upper right of this Zoom call
screen shot, and who sold it to them?

The winners shall be revealed in
next week’s column, and all victors can expect the Pop Quiz head
honcho to put their next martini at the Odeon on
the Wet Paint tab. All you have to do is be among the first people
to send the full correct answer to the adjudication department at
nfreeman@artnet.com. 

WE HEAR…

David
Nolan Gallery is moving from
Chelsea to the Upper East Side,
into the 1902 limestone townhouse at 24 East 81st Street (once home
to Klaus Kertess’s Bykert
Gallery, which housed Brice Marden’s
first solo show in 1966), and that the deal was brokered by the
gallery-space whisperer Jonathan Travis …
Enrique Martínez Celaya’s
daughter, Gab Martínez Celaya, is a
viral TikTok influencer who gave a video tour of
the art collection in her quar pad that snapped up nearly 200,000
likes, showing viewers works by Robert
Rauschenberg, Donald Baechler, and “my
father haha” … art-world blockchain bro Cameron
Winklevoss has gone full-on MAGA, sending
out a tweet protesting Twitter’s new policy of
politely pointing out President Trump’s
blatant falsehoods with this nonsense string of words masquerading
as a statement: “‘Fact checking’ is a euphemism for editorializing
which is a form of censorship” … Collector Guy
Laliberte is looking to buy back Cirque du
Soleil, which he co-founded in the 1980s, and the fact
that the flying circus is saddled with $900 million in debt has
some thinking he might part with works in a massive collection that
includes large-scale sculptures by Takashi
Murakami, Ai Weiwei, Sarah
Lucas, Yayoi Kusama and Damien
Hirst …

SPOTTED

Amy Sedaris
sheltering in place at home with a very fine Ellen
Berkenblit painting above her fireplace *** Tico
Mugrabi and Colby Mugrabi’s dog,
Mugi Mugrabi, staring out at a landscape that
looks awfully like a certain dealer’s
Gwathmey-Siegel house in
Amagansett *** Julie Curtiss
selling wood sculptures to benefit Artist Relief
in a collaboration with Case Studyo (the edition
of 16 plus 4 artist’s proofs, all priced at €12,000 each, sold out
in minutes) *** Oh that’s right, after a hike, Wet Paint saw an old
colleague, the legendary Foster Kamer, driving
down the main drag in Phoenicia, New York—pretty
wild to have a spontaneous interaction with another person in real
life ***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Top Dealer Says Art Basel Must Be
Cancelled This Fall, Kenny Schachter on a $16 Million Basquiat
Sale, & More Juicy Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet
News.